Last week we left Castle Douglas’s Carolyn Yates in late-1980s Lancashire as she contemplated a new career as a learning skills consultant with education authorities across the world.
Her acclaimed programme for unlocking children’s abilities began with her own education at a free-thinking Rudolph Steiner School in Hertfordshire and a strict Moravian church school near Derby.
She gained a Masters in Science Education and taught in tough schools around Manchester where the pupils’ general disinterest in science convinced her there must be better ways to engage young minds.
At Chelsea College in London – in the early 1980s a leading science education research centre – Carolyn co-authored a ground-breaking paper titled Cognitive Acceleration in Science Education (CASE), a radical new approach to unlocking children’s thinking and learning.
Education authorities on both sides of the Border were impressed and Dumfries and Galloway Council hired her as a consultant before her role went international.
“Kirkcudbright Academy was one of our project schools in the late 1980s,” tai chi and yoga enthusiast Carolyn remembers fondly.
“I already knew the area because we had spent some of our holidays here.
“The region was a good case study on how you can get learning resources out to rural schools.
“The schools would have topics they needed materials for which would be put into crates and taken out in the library bus.
“The teachers collected the resources as the bus toured round – it was a good model for school development that was not very expensive.”
The secondment, Carolyn explains, gave her a first real insight into working in Galloway – and she liked what she saw.
“My husband Ken and I bought a cottage in Twynholm and would bring our two boys up every weekend,” she smiles.
“Both of them learned to sail on Loch Ken.
“Ken remained working in Wigan for a couple of years while I settled up here and set up my own company, CAP Ltd.
“I was sole director. Then, when Ken left Wigan Education Authority, he joined me on the board.
“I worked with Glasgow Science Centre on the Curriculum for Excellence, ran conferences and wrote a lot of science education stuff.
“As part of that we did overseas development work and I worked in Jordan, Palestine and Pakistan.
“At that time I was employed at University College Chester and in 1995 was seconded to the British Council’s department of international development as a consultant to support a huge programme run by the Palestinian Education Authority.”
Initially, Carolyn tells me, the posting went well – not long previously the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Israeli Government signed the Oslo Accords – an interim peace arrangement providing for Palestinian self-government and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from occupied territories on the West Bank and Gaza.
For its part, the PLO acknowledged the State of Israel and pledged to reject violence while Israel recognised the PLO as representatives of their people and as partners in future negotiations.
However, certain festering issues were left unresolved including Jerusalem, refugees, illegal settlements and borders.
Extremists on both sides believed too much had been given away and the fragility of the peace became even more acute when exiled Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat returned to Palestine – just before Carolyn and her team made their first visit.
“There were a golden couple of years, from 1996 to 1998, when the international community could start to help rebuild the Palestinian Educational Authority and the schools infrastructure,” Carolyn tells me.
“We were working to improve primary education and teacher training and it felt very good until it began to get eroded by the politics.
“There was a lot of aid going into Palestine but there were still problems.
“At the time we were working there corruption was rife in some of the Palestinian National Authority departments.
“But Hanan Ashrawi, the PNA’s minister of education, was one of the unsung heroes. Her ministry got a clean bill of health.”
Preventing local support staff, who had been assigned to the British Council team, from being detained on the spot by Israeli Defence Force (IDF) personnel was one of the unexpected tasks on Carolyn’s list of duties.
“The British Council staff all had young Palestinian drivers,” she explains.
“I was told never to leave them alone at an Israeli army checkpoint, no matter what.
“On one trip an Israeli soldier tried to take my driver away and I shouted ‘No! If you do, I’m coming too!’
“They let him carry on through – I suppose the last thing they wanted was a very prim lady accompanying him into their offices!”
In 1998 the second intifada (popular uprising against the Israeli occupation)broke out and it was then, Carolyn recalls, that the writing was on the wall for her educational mission.
“I was in Ramallah (a Palestinian city on the West Bank) when the Israeli army went in and came after Arafat.
“He had his HQ in the Ministry of Education where there was a school – maybe he thought he would be more protected.
“The Israeli troops were shooting people and I saw them on the streets breaking up funeral parties which were a focus for protest.
“The British Council pulled out all its international development consultants when the trouble started to get hot.
“I was one of the last to leave.
“The West Bank Palestinian refugee camps were beginning to riot and thousands of people were erupting onto the streets.
“It was getting quite hairy and I was taken in a British Council car with diplomatic plates from Ramallah to Jerusalem, where it was safer.
“We stayed at the Jerusalem Hotel and when I phoned Ken I was very upset and wanted to come home.
“Ramallah was only 10 miles away and you could hear the crackle of gunfire and up in the hills in the outskirts of Jerusalem.”
A quarter of a century on and with no peace in Palestine in sight, Carolyn looks back on the tragedy with great sorrow.
“The Israelis did not help the situation,” she says. “But there was tension between the PLO and Hamas and maybe if Arafat had not been so concerned about his own position of power Palestine might have been okay.
“All the chances of negotiations were squandered to the delight of the Israeli government.
“We had Israeli Arabs – Israeli citizens – working at the British Council and I was made aware that the Israeli government line was very different from most of the people of Israel. It felt a very messy time and I stopped working there.
“I was not very happy with the situation.”
Following the British Council secondment, Carolyn resigned from University College Chester and looked for a house in the Stewartry to live in permanently.
Soon she was off to Karachi in Pakistan on another educational development posting – and flew straight into more political unrest.
“I had got into overseas development consultancy work then we found Meikle Knox near Castle Douglas, which was a bit of a ruin at the time and took us years to do up,” Carolyn recounts.
“Not long after I arrived in Pakistan there was a military coup led by General Musharraf – I was there when it happened.
“I went for a walk and when I came back there were all these soldiers lining the street.
“At the hotel they said ‘just stay inside today – there’s been a coup and there might be trouble’.
“I was working with a nursery school helping to educate poorer kids in Karachi.
“We would send the children home with lettered building bricks and flash cards with simple words on them.
“They were very low cost teacher training materials.
“The idea was that you were beginning to educate the mothers as well.
“The Karachi teachers were keen to reach illiterate families and the teachers themselves learned about illiteracy in the home.
“It was a practical way of giving teachers new skills and supporting families with young children. It was a really nice project.”
As Meikle Knox took shape, Carolyn tells me, freelance consultancy work continued until 2010 when she landed a job as literary development officer with Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association.
Initiatives included “poetry doubles” where a local poet would be paired up with a nationally renowned poet to perform at poetry events across the region.
A year later it was off to the Wigtown Festival Company in Scotland’s National Booktown where Carolyn had pretty much a carte blanche in developing ways to bring forward local talent.
“I set up the Wigtown Inc. Festival as a platform for local writers as part of the main festival programme,” she recalls.
“The arts association writer in residence at the time was Rab Wilson who gave me on the job training in Scots.
“I went out to schools and museums with Rab who was a great Robert Burns guy – it really was a crash course in the Scots language.
“I got really interested in the language and its muscularity of expression.”
Talking to Carolyn, the phrase lifelong learning springs to mind so I’m not entirely surprised to learn that after five years with the festival company she was off to university again – at the age of 60 – to do a Masters in Playwriting at Edinburgh University.
“The writer and poet Tom Pow – I had been on one of his creative writing courses – was my referee,” she tells me.
“I was most drawn to theatre and at Edinburgh as part of the course you had to write three full length plays.
“Extracts of the final one, your dissertation piece, were performed by a professional company of actors at the Edinburgh Fringe.
“Mine was about Palestine called The Olive Tree.
“Last year as part of Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival I presented my play Gazing.
“It went on tour last year and was performed at Govan, the Theatre Royal in Dumfries and the Catstrand.”
Helping young people to reach their full creative potential, it seems, has been a constant refrain throughout Carolyn’s professional life.
And that desire found expression again in 2019, I learn, when she founded a young people’s theatre company, Performance Collective Stranraer (PCS).
“We had nothing here for young people, who, perhaps, because they were carers at home or facing other difficulties, could get involved in,” Carolyn explains.
“PCS does not hold auditions – all the young people need to bring is a passion for making theatre and film.
“There are people with complex physical and mental health issues such as autism or ADHD who can make great theatre, perhaps in unconventional ways. It’s completely inclusive.
“Many members are now working elsewhere in places like Glasgow but come back to do shows.
“We’ve produced a play called Unsupervised Adulting, funded by Creative Scotland and the regional arts fund.
“It’s touring across Dumfries and Galloway at the end of October as part of Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association’s Arts Live programme.
“Also, we pay our actors which means they can go for their Equity card.
“For that you need to show you have performed in a number of paid gigs.
“It’s like on the job training.”
Currently the chairperson of Castle Douglas Development Forum, Carolyn has big plans for Lochside Park which, along with the caravan park and former outdoor activity centre, is currently the subject of a community assert transfer bid.
“We have a major vision for the park which we intend to call The Crannog Campus,” she tells me.
“We think the whole of the park could be much more community friendly.
“It is a much-loved place and having the activity centre standing empty is a waste. It is such a fantastic resource.”
